Recycled Polyester – An inconvenient truth
With plastic bags on their way out, the focus has shifted to our clothing.
Polyester, Dri Gear, Quick Dry… It is all plastic. And consumers are starting to notice.
But what about recycled plastic, I mean it was already plastic so what is the harm in turning it into the fabric, has to be better than going into a landfill right? I mean they quote numbers such as how takes around 2,700 liters of water to grow enough cotton to manufacture a single T-shirt so it must be significantly better than cotton.
Wrong
Each cycle of a washing machine can release hundreds of thousand plastic fibers into the environment. A paper published in 2011 in the journal Environmental Science Technology found that microfibers made up 85 percent of human-made debris on shorelines around the world.
Source: https://custombranded.co.nz/great-quality-t-shirt-printing-auckland
Source: https://fashionunited.uk/news/fashion/how-sustainable-is-recycled-polyester/2018111540000
Daniel, an Auckland based printer points out that;
“Plastic fibres look extremely tasty and end up in the smallest of marine life, and work their way up the food chain from there, we tend to stick to cotton where possible.”
This doesn’t even take into consideration how much is leaching into our skin when we surround ourselves with any number of chemical combinations in synthetic fabric.
